As Pundette summarizes “And then Lynda Williams cut the baby’s spinal cord.” Just a routine abortion at the Gosnell clinic. Nothing of note. See Pundette for the rest.

If the media were honest, Kermit Gosnell would be compared to Mengele, his minions like Lynda Williams to other Nazis who were able to partake in the horrific crimes against humanity because they had seen so much blood they had become desensitized.

But the media isn’t honest about what happened at Gosnell’s clinic in the name of “choice.” Because what happens in an abattoir abortion clinic stays in an abortion clinic, especially when run for profit. Don’t forget Gosnell made millions off what he did, even if he kept trophy baby feet of the infants he killed in waste containers tossed in a rat infested basement.

If the media were honest about what happened in Gosnell’s clinic, more people would see the reality of abortion rather than “products of conception” and other fuzzy liberal euphemisms used to conceal the horror of snipping the spinal cords of viable babies born alive in the third trimester. But it’s legal to kill our progeny as long as they’re completely defenseless, so in our national shame we cower to the “rights” deemed appropriate to women who want to butcher their young.

I’ve been absent largely because of my expanded young family. New baby slept, and then he didn’t. We still need food and clean laundry. And we’ve all been sick, etc. But in large part I’ve lost heart after a blowout of a fight over abortion after one of my best and dearest friends announced she, too, was votin’ with her vajay-jay or some such last fall.

It wouldn’t have mattered as much, I guess, if she weren’t Catholic, or if she weren’t the Godmother to my oldest. But she is. And to hear someone I held dear announce she was siding with the Sandra Flukes of the world devastated me. I know other people who believe in abortion rights. But her public proclamation of her deepest vagina thoughts which were threatened by evil Republicans who would take away her vaginal rights to kill her own tore at my soul. How could someone whose judgement I once trusted now rationalize such evil? I guess that’s the power of media, of reading HuffPo, of watching Jon Stewart. It all chips away at the truth slowly. She claimed another friend had a problem pregnancy and would have been prevented live-saving medical treatment if those eeeevil Republicans were in power. But what she described–a molar pregnancy–isn’t a pregnancy at all, despite blood tests to the contrary. No one would prevent a D&C in such cases because there was no pregnancy. She was not convinced. And I remain heartbroken.

If the media were honest, every newspaper would headline Gosnell daily. So that people like my friend could see the reality of “choice.” But that’s why the media cowers in fear from Gosnell and his clinic: hearts and minds would change when confronted with big, viable babies “snipped” and thrown out like trash, their feet chopped off as macabre trophies for a demented man who made millions as a legal abortionist.

Gosnell is our Mengele, and he, too, operated legally. Oremus. When people hear–if they ever do even with partial media coverage–of viable babies “snipped” or butchered in toilets, of his trophies kept in freezers, or in cat food jars, then maybe wecan have a serious discussion about what abortion really is. “Products of conception” is just a fuzzy liberal euphemism to make folks feel less horror when they realize they agree to let women butcher their own babies.

So says Dr Laura de Rooy, a consultant neonatologist at St George’s Hospital NHS Trust in London writing in response to an article published in the British Medical Journal of the placement of disabled infants on the Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP).

The LCP was developed to help push those clinging for life off the cliff, so to speak. The elderly and terminally ill. It defines the “care” for patients no longer deemed fit for life in the much-vaunted free NHS. Free for those healthy enough to survive it, maybe. But I digress.

Severely disabled infants have been placed on the LCP. Starving a baby to death. Brings new meaning to the term “care protocol,” no? More:

Earlier this month, an un-named doctor wrote of the agony of watching the protracted deaths of babies. The doctor described one case of a baby born with ‘a lengthy list of unexpected congenital anomalies’, whose parents agreed to put it on the pathway.

The doctor wrote: ‘They wish for their child to die quickly once the feeding and fluids are stopped. They wish for pneumonia. They wish for no suffering. They wish for no visible changes to their precious baby.

‘Their wishes, however, are not consistent with my experience. Survival is often much longer than most physicians think; reflecting on my previous patients, the median time from withdrawal of hydration to death was ten days.

‘Parents and care teams are unprepared for the sometimes severe changes that they will witness in the child’s physical appearance as severe dehydration ensues.

‘I know, as they cannot, the unique horror of witnessing a child become smaller and shrunken, as the only route out of a life that has become excruciating to the patient or to the parents who love their baby.’

According to the BMJ article, the doctor involved had presided over ten such deaths in just one hospital neonatal unit.

One British nurse has the guts to call the practice what it is:

Bernadette Lloyd, a hospice paediatric nurse, has written to the Cabinet Office and the Department of Health to criticise the use of death pathways for children.She said: ‘The parents feel coerced, at a very traumatic time, into agreeing that this is correct for their child whom they are told by doctors has only has a few days to live. It is very difficult to predict death. I have seen a “reasonable” number of children recover after being taken off the pathway.

‘I have also seen children die in terrible thirst because fluids are withdrawn from them until they die.

‘I witnessed a 14 year-old boy with cancer die with his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth when doctors refused to give him liquids by tube. His death was agonising for him, and for us nurses to watch. This is euthanasia by the backdoor.’

And this is the system we rush to emulate because it’s far more compassionate? Read the rest.

Oh, wait, a parting thought from the doctor:

Some say withdrawing medically provided hydration and nutrition is akin to withdrawing any other form of life support. Maybe, but that is not how it feels. The one thing that helps me a little is the realisation that this process is necessarily difficult. It needs to be.

To acknowledge that a child’s prospects are so dire, so limited, that we will not or cannot provide artificial nutrition is self selecting for the rarity of the situations in which parents and care teams would ever consider it.

Loving a child on the fringe will no longer be an option in an IPAB world (H/t: Pundette). The choice to love a baby whose life will be deemed too costly for living won’t be ours alone to make. The Peter Singers of the world will reign.

Scary thought, isn’t it?

Back to cleaning and cooking for me, avoiding the news and politics and all. This real-world stuff is for the birds.

Via Pundette, Barbara Curtis of Mommylife.net has had a serious stroke. She is a writer, blogger, and Catholic mom of 12. I have many of her books on teaching littles and have directed many friends over the years in need of guidance and support for parenting. Please keep her and the family in prayer.

UPDATE: Please read this from Elizabeth Foss and donate if you can to help the family, and daughter Maddie specifically. I am heartbroken. My mother suffered a stroke eight years ago, and thankfully–no, miraculously–saw the same doc in the ER who had given her a cardio stress test weeks before. He knew immediately it had to be a stroke and was able to administer drugs accordingly. According to Elizabeth, Barbara will not regain consciousness. Tears. I have read Barbara’s blog for five years and am awed by how much life she has lived and how many lives she has touched. Pray.

Forgive the absence. Chalk half up to a newborn in the house along with the home schooler, and the other half to needing mental quiet. I find the current news cycle on the eve of this election both unnerving and exhausting. I have let my passions get the best of me in fights with dear friends suckered into voting with their lady parts. I crave the quiet.

That said, I find myself awed by the number of Romney signs on my street inside the beltway. To be fair, an equal number of Obama signs dot lawns littered with falling leaves and pumpkins. An equal number? I take delight in each one. I picked up two this week in Arlington at the Romney Virginia HQ. Staffers gave pjKid a sticker which she then wore proudly to Trader Joe’s. In Clarendon. The epicenter for Obama voters, no? A lady stopped us. I was sure she was going to call child protective services or throw tomatoes. She high-fived the kid. Could this really be happening?

Romney so aptly described Obama’s approach while doing so with humor, grace, and wit.

Obama looked befuddled that someone would dare challenge him–with facts, no less. He should have just taken Michelle out to a fancy dinner with all the trappings of his office, you know the drill, the free flight, stopping traffic, free limo service. Because he certainly isn’t up to the rigors of his office.

He seemed caught flat-footed with Romney’s assertion that he’s already been President four years. Obama never has to defend his record since the press does it for him, but even Jim Lehrer’s promptings (he couldn’t help himself, twice!) couldn’t save Obama from the sinking economic wreckage of his own creation.

Romney laid down a good test for the existence of federal government programs: Is it so critical that we need to borrow money from China to pay for it? And he didn’t pander to Jim Lehrer while using this test: Romney told him that he would zero out “PBS” for that reason.

Pardon my absence. In all honesty, I’ve retreated from the news because I can’t stand it right now. It’s pathetic, and I can’t wait for the election to be over.

(Can I leave the country for a month? I vote by absentee ballot anyway).

I’m not the only one. This cross-country move was the hardest we’ve faced. I feel like I’ve earned a little nesting time with my family, cooking, sewing, finding donations for my church sale and boxing already outgrown newborn clothes (far too soon!) for the crisis pregnancy center. Making matching skirts for my daughter and her baby doll. Cuddling my son. Avoiding the reality of the culture outside.

This from Althouse intrigues me. In a nutshell: a mom writes advice columnist to bemoan her daughter’s attitude. Said daughter lays the guilt on thick because she hates her state school and wanted to go private. Mom and dad foot the bill to the tune of $26,000 a year.

How entitled, no? To bitch about your paid college education because it wasn’t the one you wanted.

If you wanted something badly enough, you would work to make it happen, no?

But the entitlement mentality persists. We have the Sandra Flukes of the world, shelling out 50k a year for law school at Georgetown who can’t hop over to Target for a $9 prescription. Someone else should pay for what I want, not me. Keep the government out of my vagina they cry in one breath, but shill Uncle Sugar for the pill in the next so they can all do with their hootchies what they will. Keep out of my interests until I want something for free and not see the irony in the request. It depresses the hell out of me.

The media will do everything to discourage you from voting. But don’t despair. Obama may have a post-convention bounce, but it’s nothing like the lead Dukakis had or even Carter. So fret not. And remain vigilant.

Though I think I agree with George Will, the GOP should pack it up if it doesn’t win this fall. I fear John Hinderacker may be right, we may well be past the tipping point of gimme-gimme culture voting itself more bennies:

Maybe this anxiety is misplaced. President Obama has never been able to rise above 47% support in the polls, and perhaps when November comes undecided voters will break against the incumbent, as the conventional wisdom has it. Maybe the election won’t be so close after all. We’d all better hope so. Because, given the rate at which Democrats are frantically adding to the dependency state, another four years of Obama may be enough to tip the balance between the private sector and government dependence once and for all.

Just reading that gives me the willies. If the Obama campaign can slice-and-dice its way to a majority of special interests, what will become of the rest of us? Maybe Greece after it collapses entirely, eh? The welfare state can’t exist if there’s no income to be had, no? We can just … buy what’s left? It was the cradle of democracy once before. Who knows.

So this is America’s best and brightest — or, at any rate, most expensively credentialed. Sandra Fluke has been blessed with a quarter-million dollars of elite education, and, on the evidence of Wednesday night, is entirely incapable of making a coherent argument. She has enjoyed the leisurely decade-long varsity once reserved for the minor sons of Mitteleuropean grand dukes, and she has concluded that the most urgent need facing the Brokest Nation in History is for someone else to pay for the contraception of 30-year-old children. She says the choice facing America is whether to be “a country where we mean it when we talk about personal freedom, or one where that freedom doesn’t apply to our bodies and our voices” — and, even as the words fall leaden from her lips, she doesn’t seem to comprehend that Catholic institutions think their “voices” ought to have freedom, too, or that Obamacare seizes jurisdiction over “our bodies” and has 16,000 new IRS agents ready to fine us for not making arrangements for “our” pancreases and “our” bladders that meet the approval of the commissars. Sexual liberty, even as every other liberty withers, is all that matters: A middle-school girl is free to get an abortion without parental consent, but if she puts a lemonade stand on her lawn she’ll be fined. What a bleak and reductive concept of “personal freedom.”